A Human-Tracking Robot Using Ultra Wideband Technology

In this paper, a target person tracking method based on the ultra-wideband (UWB) technology is proposed for the implementation of the human-tracking robots. For such robots, the detection and calculation of the position and orientation of the target person play an essential role in the implementation of the human following function. A modified hyperbolic positioning algorithm is devised to overcome the challenge of the measurement errors. In addition, a modified virtual spring model is implemented in the robot to track the target person. One important advantage of such a UWB-based method compared with the computer vision-based methods lies in its robustness against the environment condition. In fact, the computer vision methods can be very sensitive to lighting conditions which make them suffer from the unconstrained outdoor environment. The robust performance of our methods is illustrated by the experimental results on a real-world robot.